legend--woven in red--of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next
half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous
hostelry. During that time I had become fairly accustomed to my new
surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy
turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and
action. All the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the
fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers
which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform that ran parallel
with and a little behind the shakers' tables. The negroes were stripped
to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. There was something
demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of
boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the
swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. The
latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy
load. The contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers'
tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we--the shakers--redumped
the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who
ironed it all out in the hot rolls. So, after several other dumpings and
redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled.

Meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first
ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms--that excruciating,
nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular
action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to
watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four
Italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from
fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl,
with delicate wrists and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior
to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for
the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was
a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament,
who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to
the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames--she who
had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony,
Mrs. Mooney. Both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward
everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each
sustained her flagging energies with